ENDPAPER; The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes

1. Miss Wormwood is a proponent of the Mortimer J. Adler Paedia Proposal, that Great Books about great ideas and deeds should be introduced in the elementary grades (Adler, 1985); cf. Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"--"Book learning is most of what a teacher can give." (Bloom, 1987). This is the if-you-build-the-schoolhouse-the-pupils-will-come-and-worship-gods-of-learning school of education.* 2. Calvin may be an example Howard Gardener refers to as Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 1993). though Gardener refuses to admit it. Here Calvin clearly exhibits strengths in linguistic, scientific and outerspatial intelligence.** 3. You can see from Calvin's obvious level of emotional and intellectual commitment to comic books that reading them puts him in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as flow: "When challeges are high and personal skills are used to the utmost, we experience that rare state of consciousness . . . . We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993).*** 4. Miss Wormwood is a devoted disciplinary disciple of either William or Jesse James. **** Her oppoents argue displeased with Calvin's ahistoricity. However, Calvin could counter that many famous and successful people had little regard for history, viz. Henry Ford, "History is more or less bunk", and cf. Ronald Reagan, "Facts are stupid things" et passim.

5. Miss Wormwood takes the neoconservative approach along with Adler, Bloom, E.D. Hirtsch and William Bennett, who hunger for a capacious store of common knowledge and skills.*****

6. Gardner is insistent that Calvin's strong domains of intelligence not be labeled "dumb" and "useless" by an uncaring educational system that has only "impatience with approaches that cherish the individuality of each student." (ibid) Bloom, however, knows Calvin is dumb and useless. Sociologist Paul Fussell adds that what Calvin knows is not only dumb and useless but bad. (Fussell, 1991). 7. Fussell reports there are 60 million functionally illiterate adults in the United States, with another 60 million reading at a fifth grade level. Only 6 percent of the population report having read at least one book in the last year. (ibid) 8. Calvin did read at least one bona fide book last year, in addition to "Captain Thermonuclear etc." It was Robert Fulghum's "Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." At least he started it.+ 9. Calvin can only agree with Gardner that "a significant part of our educational malaise lay in the mindless instruments that were conventionally used to assess student learning" (Gardner, op cit) and with John Dewey that "In contrast to the 'testing society' I think that the assessment approach and the individual-centered school constitute a more noble educational vision. Both are more inkeeping with American democratic and pluralistic values (Dewey, 1938). "Relativism!" scoffs Bloom. BAD, says Fussell. *Hah! Wrong! Even if you build it, they will still sit around reading comic books. (Hobbes) ** Note: there is no entry for "Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty" in E.D. Hirsch's "A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know" (Hirsch, 1989). ***But what is the poor lad getting excited about? Trash like Captain Thermonuclear? Doesn't he know that in Hobbes' words, life is "mean, nasty, brutish and short"? (Hobbes, 19TK).+ ****This was still being debated when Education Life went to press. 7: [ NO! NO! You journalists are all the same. What I actually told the Republican National Convention in 1988, quoting from John Addams, of course was this: "Facts are stupid things, stubborn things, I should say." -- Ronald Reagan. Incidentally, if you tip either this footnote symbol or your head on its side, you'll see it makes a very nice, small portrait of me. *****That capacious-store business is actually a clever bit of plagarism on Nash's part but we heard somewhere that, if you confess that kind of thin it in a footnote to a footnote, you're all right. (Eds.) + Actually, he didn't even start it. He read the cover and figured that was all he needed to know. (Hobbs)

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A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 1994, on Page A4 of the National edition with the headline: ENDPAPER; The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe